An ultrasonic diagnosis device is a medical imager that emits ultrasonic waves to a subject body and obtains a cross-sectional image of soft tissue based on reflected waves from tissue in the body, and ultrasonic diagnosis devices are widely used in various types of diagnosing due to their safety.
In the case of monitoring a lesion over time with use of tomographic images (hereinafter, called “diagnostic images”) of soft tissue that have been acquired with an ultrasonic diagnosis device, it is possible to make a differential diagnosis as to whether, for example, the lesion has become worse than before or is getting better by comparing diagnostic images previously acquired at a site in a subject body and current diagnostic images that have been newly acquired at the same site in the same subject body, to see how the size of the displayed affected tissue or the shape of the affected margin has changed, how the brightness of the affected site relative to the peripheral tissue has changed, and so on.
In order to make such differential diagnoses reliably, the previously acquired diagnostic images and the newly-acquired current diagnostic images need to be acquired with the same image quality, and in order to achieve this, it is required for the parameters used when acquiring the previous diagnostic images and the parameters used when acquiring the new diagnostic images to be set identically. Also, it is required for such setting to be able to be performed easily and in a short amount of time in order to alleviate the burden on the operator.
An ultrasonic diagnosis device having a configuration such as shown in FIG. 7 is a known example of a conventional ultrasonic diagnosis device. In this device, a probe 30 emits ultrasonic waves based on a transmission signal from a transmission/reception unit 31, detects reflected waves, and supplies a corresponding signal to the transmission/reception unit 31. A reception signal output from the transmission/reception unit 31 is converted into a digital signal by an A/D converter 32, and a phasing and adding unit 33 performs phasing and addition on the digitized reception signal. The signal obtained by the phasing and addition is subjected to processing performed by a signal processing unit 34 and then is sent to a display image data generation unit 35, which generates display image data that then is displayed as an image by a display unit 36. The signal processing unit 34, the display image data generation unit 35, and the like are controlled by a control unit 39 that is for controlling various units. The control unit 39 is connected to an input unit 37 and a storage unit 38, and the storage unit 38 is also connected to the display image data generation unit 35.
In this ultrasonic diagnosis device, a subject body identifier, a diagnostic image, and image parameters used in diagnostic image acquisition are associated with each other and stored in the storage unit 38, and when a subject body identifier newly is input from the input unit 37, the ultrasonic diagnosis device has a function for performing a search to find out whether data related to that subject body exists in the storage unit 38. If such data exists, the diagnostic image and image parameters used in diagnostic image acquisition are readout from the storage unit 38, and the associated image parameters are set as the image parameters to be used in current diagnostic image acquisition. Then, the acquired current diagnostic image and the diagnostic image that was readout from the storage unit 38 are displayed simultaneously on the display unit 36 (e.g., see Patent Document 1).                Patent Document 1: JP 2006-55326A        